Chimney Sweeping in Santa Fe Springs, CA

Chimney Sweeping for Santa Fe Springs Homeowners

Santa Fe Springs is unusual in being mostly industrial with residential neighbourhoods set into it, so the housing comes in distinct pockets rather than a continuous fabric. Around Heritage Park and the Clarke Estate there is genuine age and some fine early work; the Los Nietos area and the tracts to the south are largely 1950s. The city also has a long oil and industrial history, which shows up in two ways relevant to a chimney. The first is soil: portions of the city have been worked, filled and re-graded over a century, and settlement on made ground puts stress on rigid masonry stacks. The second is air. Heavy industry and truck routes deposit a persistent film on roofs and into open flues, and combined with the marine layer that produces the same dense mat on the smoke shelf we see in Paramount. Because residential streets here sit close to commercial buildings and yards, spark arrestor screens are worth taking seriously on any chimney where wood is actually burned.

Residential pockets within industrial land, settlement on made ground, and heavy airborne deposition into open flues.

Almost nobody in Los Angeles County heats with a fireplace. People light ten or twenty fires a winter, on the handful of evenings that drop into the fifties, and assume that light use means no maintenance. It is precisely the wrong conclusion. Short, cool, smouldering fires never get the flue hot enough to carry volatiles out of the system, so they condense on the walls as glazed creosote — the hardest kind to remove and the easiest to ignite. Then there is the marine layer. From May through July the masonry here stays damp most mornings, and damp soot turns acidic and eats mortar joints from the inside where nobody looks. Add year-round bird and roof-rat activity and an uncapped flue that has sat open for a decade, and a great many chimneys in this county are carrying a season of nesting material on top of years of buildup.